by Steven Moore
Well, gentle reader, are you satisfied with this story of our fair anchorite? “I was sometimes” (you will answer) “greatly puzzled.” What does this signify? If I have extricated myself well, the more praise I shall deserve. When a person rambles he knows not whither, if he happens to guide himself tolerably, he deserves applause more than those who travel with a map. I can assure you (be this said without vanity) that I shall not be a little delighted with myself if I can but get Pharsamond away from here as successfully. Let us therefore proceed under the direction of chance. To which of the two shall we go first, to Clorinna [the anchorite] or Phrasamond?―Let us speak a word or so concerning Clorinna, and this being done we will make a transition to Pharsamond, who will not be tired with waiting for us. (1:229–30)
As the novel progresses, the narrator becomes testier and more defiant:
Our knight admired many of these [paintings], which were originals by the best masters. “How the deuce” (will some critic say) “was it possible for Pharsamond, born and bred in the country, and whose best companions were a set of half-polished country gentlemen, to be a judge of painting? Content yourself with supposing him an adept in love, and stop there.” Hold, good critic; shall I not be allowed to hazard some things, and must you be forever rectifying the slips and oversights that occur in my book? But I will take it for granted that Pharsamond might have done wrong in admiring and preferring some pictures in the gallery. But then he admired. I said so, and let that stand. I should be obliged to change many particulars was I to accommodate myself to your taste in everything. (1:283–84)
Then the narrator blows his top when the critic complains that only a trifling remark by Clito set in motion the manic mayhem the narrator has just described with such comic gusto; the exasperated narrator’s reaction is worth quoting at length, especially given the rarity of this novel:
“What a strange rhapsody” (will some serious critic say) “do you give us here! Your brain must certainly be much more confused than that of those with whose terrors you have entertained us. Chairs, stools, and tables thrown down, Dame Margery acting the madwoman in her shift, thirty servants making a strange hurly-burly, running up stairs and then rolling down them, and all this merely because Clito wakes and cries, ‘Who’s there?’ ”
But why should this surprize you so much, Mr Critic? Had you yourself met with the like adventure, you then might have run away with a much better grace than you now criticize. You are surprized that a nothing should produce so mighty an effect; but don’t you know (good logician!) that nothing is the motive of the great changes which happen among men? know you not that a nothing fixes and determines the mind of all sublunary mortals, that it destroys the most strongly cemented friendships, extinguishes the most violent love, or gives rise to it? that a nothing exalts this man, and ruins that? Are you ignorant, I say, that a nothing can put an end to the most illustrious life, that a nothing brings discredit, and alters the face of the most important affairs? that a nothing is able to drown cities, or set them on fire? ’tis always a nothing that begins the greatest nothings that follow, all which end in nothing? Know you not, Mr Critic (since I am on this subject), that you yourself are an errant nothing, and that I myself am no more? that a nothing gave rise to your criticism, on occasion of a nothing, which suggested to me all these idle whimsies?
Here are many nothings, for a true nothing. However, I must extricate myself one way or another from this subject; but I love to moralise, ’tis my darling passion; and were it decent to leave my personages in the wide fields and not assist them, I would add (in contempt of the nothing censured in my work) that the famous trifles wherewith men are busied, and which are looked upon as subjects the most worthy of the human mind, are perhaps, to those who view them in a proper light, but mighty nothings, more contemptible (though perhaps more dangerous) than the little nothings like to those which, at this instant, drive my pen at random over the paper. (2:28–30)
This is a startling, even nihilist view of the role chance plays in existence, a leveling of all human accomplishments to mere happenstance. But for a novelist, it’s a demonstration that a talented writer can make something out of nothing.
The second half of the novel is dominated by Clito’s rustic adventures and Sancho Panzan dialogue, a remarkable infusion of realism into the French novel. After Clito narrates an apple-stealing incident from his youth in his bumpkin dialect, the narrator anticipates a fastidious reader’s objection to this lowlife stuff, for at this time (and for a considerable time afterward) many still felt that novels should feature only noble characters and lofty thoughts. Marivaux’s narrator delivers a historically important declaration of independence from such expectations and a defense of artistry over subject matter:
“How dull a character is that of Clito whenever he is made to spin out his discourse to so tedious a length?” will some grave reader cry, whose stomach the apples have soured, “and how greatly am I obliged to the guests for saving us from the remainder of his tale!” Harkee, reader. I could take upon me to defend the story of my squire and assert that it is excellent. I’ll warrant you (may I argue), because it mentions apples, sparrows, and children diverting themselves, you thence conclude that the whole must be heavy and insipid. But know that the materials are [not] what make a relation sprightly or dull.115 The gravest historian, in relating the fall of an empire, . . . is sometimes as dull as an account of two boys playing at blind man’s bluff could possibly be. The pleasure or uneasiness we feel at hearing a story told arises wholly from the manner in which the subject is treated. And if the sport of such children as we are speaking of is but naturally described, and in a manner suitable to the subject, such a narrative may divert the mind as much in proportion as the relation of a great and tragical story shall exalt it. An apple is indeed an insignificant thing; sparrows are no more than sparrows; but then every subject, how low soever, may be raised by throwing the proper beauties round it. The only difference then is in the manner: and therefore it would be ridiculous to assert that a rural maid, though adorned by nature with the most lovely charms, is not beautiful and consequently could not enchant the eye merely because she is unaccompanied with all the pomp that glitters round a princess. (2:114–15)
Giddy with artistic confidence, the narrator begins defying convention and lording it over his creation:
Our whole company are now got to bed. ’Tis three in the morning with regard to them, but ’tis no more than nine at night with respect to myself, for which reason I’ll bring them all into action again as though they had snored away the four and twenty hours round.
Up! up! I am instantly obeyed. Already the servants stretch forth their arms and rub their eyes. (2:116–17)
Nearing the end of his critifiction, the swaggering narrator has learned to trust his instincts and write to please himself, rather than worry about pleasing others. After he praises the “beautiful adventures” recounted in the second embedded novella, he spars with his imagined critic a final time:
I say beautiful adventures.—Bless us! this is an expression will highly disgust a critic and force from him a malicious laugh. “Beautiful adventures!” he will cry: “if these adventures be called beautiful, pray what are those you term ugly ones?” Too importunate critic! I know not what kind of thing ugly adventures are, but I’ll stake (by way of wager) the prettiest incident in my work that those I hint at are really beautiful. “Bravo!” cries my fantastical censurer, “the prettiest incident in the present work:—’Tis plain he has the vanity to imagine that his own book is interspersed with pretty and beautiful touches.—Very fine all this. We yet may pronounce that there are few touches of this sort in it, and that such are almost eclipsed by deformities.” It will be impossible for me, severe censor, ever to get the better of you, and the only result of our contest (though ever so obstinate) must be this: you would prove yourself very morose, and perhaps tasteless (forgive this last word), and I myself should discover not a little vanity in so strenuously def
ending my book. A fig for compositions where the author is not delighted with what he writes, and consequently does not applaud himself; and especially when such a one takes up the pen merely by way of amusement, and that, whilst he strives to divert himself, he is not persuaded that he shall entertain others. (2:249–50)
Works for me. Marivaux’s winning combination of comical adventures, metafictional digressions, and guarded sympathy for those of us who prefer the world of novels to the real one makes Pharsamond one of the most entertaining novels I’ve ever read. It’s unclear why he didn’t publish it upon completion; one censorious critic suggests it was Marivaux’s “awareness of its mediocrity” (Rosbottom, 62n9), which I don’t buy. I assume publishers turned it down either because his previous novel sold poorly or because there were many other parodies and continuations of Don Quixote already available. When the novel was eventually bootlegged in 1737, Marivaux disavowed it, perhaps because the heroic romances it mocks were old hat by then, perhaps because he considered it incompatible with the novels he was writing in the 1730s. But Pharsamond’s influence can’t be disavowed. Even censorious Rosbottom notes how the anchorite’s tale anticipates Richardson’s fiction (65), and the novel as a whole not only anticipates Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy, but according to Genette it is “one of the missing links between Don Quixote and Madame Bovary,” another novel about a young woman who, like Cidalise, is driven to distraction by romantic novels.116
Such novels inspire ideals that are usually at odds with the way of the world; a variation of this conflict animates Marivaux’s most famous and influential novel, The Life of Marianne, Countess of ***** (1731–41), whose teenage protagonist clings to ideals of virtue more suitable to the heroines of the romance novels she reads than to herself, an orphan dependent upon the kindness of strangers. Structurally, the novel is identical to Villedieu’s Memoirs: over the course of 11 long letters, the 50-year-old Marianne dramatizes for her unnamed female correspondent the two tumultuous months following her arrival in Paris at the age of 15. Adopted by a country priest and his sister after her apparently aristocratic parents were murdered by highwaymen when she was two, teenage Marianne is taken to Paris by the sister, who takes ill and dies, but not before asking a monk to take care of the foundling. (The country priest suffers a financial setback at the same time, eliminating him from the picture.) The monk recommends the young beauty to the patronage of Monsieur de Climal, a pious hypocrite in his late fifties, who buys Marianne a place with a linen-draper named Madame Dutour, then begins plying her with expensive clothing and unwanted affection. Encouraged by the worldly Dutour to take the old goat for whatever she can get, the unworldly Marianne coyly tries to put him off while luxuriating in the gorgeous dress he bought her.
She wears it to church one day, flaunting her charms in what one critic has called “an artful striptease”;117 she notices that men are paying greater attention to her than to Mass, so “Now and then, to keep them in play, I entertained them with the discovery of some new charm in my person.” First she looks upward at the church’s paintings, the better to display her beautiful eyes, then reaches up to adjust her hood so that she can reveal her “naked” hand and “a round, delicate, smooth arm, half of which was seen at least in the attitude I then held it.” The coquette knows this pleases the messieurs because “a fine hand is in some sort an advance towards nakedness.”118 She is especially pleased by the ogling of a young aristocrat named Valville; on her way home, she hurts her foot in a minor accident and is taken to the closest house, which turns out to be Valville’s. In another of the novel’s many prurient scenes, Marianne is stripped of her stockings and Valville eagerly assists the doctor in examining her pretty little footsie. It’s love at first sight for both of them, but conscious of the unacceptable gap between their social stations, Marianne returns to the linen-draper’s without letting the young man know where she lives. Later that event-filled day, Climal is aroused by the sight of her in that new dress, and when he gets a little too affectionate, our auburn-haired beauty threatens to end their relationship and tries to return the dress he bought her, resulting in another striptease:
And you must know [she tells her correspondent], that while I was speaking thus to him, I unpinned myself, and undressed my head, because the cap I had on came from him, so that it was off in an instant and I was bareheaded, with the fine hair I spoke to you of, which hung down as far as my waist.
This sight entirely disconcerted him. (1:123)
Not surprisingly, this stops Climal in his tracks and he tries to patch things up by offering to set her up in a private house (as his mistress, it is implied); she refuses, he withdraws his financial support, and Mme Dutour reluctantly tells Marianne she has to move out. Bewailing her fate in a church, Marianne is rescued by Mme de Miran, who pays for her to stay a convent until she can sort things out.119 In a novel filled with incredible coincidences, this kind stranger turns out to be Climal’s sister and Valville’s mother; at first she disapproves of her son’s wish to marry the orphan—what would society think?!—but later agrees after being won over by Marianne’s aristocratic comportment and especially by her charming devotion to her. The marriage is delayed for various reasons, including Marianne’s melodramatic abduction by Valville’s relatives bent on breaking them up, as well as Valville’s new interest in another pretty boarder at the convent whom he met when she too suffered an accident, necessitating the removal of her corset in front of his bulging eyes. In jealous frustration, Marianne contemplates taking religious vows, even though she has a new marriage offer from a fine gentleman who heard her story and admires her virtuous conduct; but another nun, named Tervire, tries to dissuade Marianne from the religious life by telling her life story, a novella-length narrative that occupies the final three installments of Marianne. It breaks off near what was probably the end of the nun’s story, followed by a promise by Marianne to conclude both it and her own story, but Marivaux abandoned the novel at that point. Though he lived for another 20 years, he never bothered to write the conclusion nor tell how he planned to end it. Peter Brooks convincingly argues that Marivaux already achieved his end: “Marivaux is really interested only in a moment of his character’s life, the moment of confrontation with worldliness. This confrontation provokes Marianne’s ‘explication’ of self, and it is her movement into a state of lucid social consciousness and self-consciousness that forms the true subject of the novel” (135–36). The subtitle indicates Marianne eventually fulfilled her aristocratic destiny, and a number of other writers jumped in to connect the dots in sequels and continuations, but these don’t concern us.
What does concern us is Marivaux’s innovations, beginning with his treatment of narrative time. Once Marianne arrives in Paris, the narrative slows to a crawl as she analyzes and defends her actions in minute detail, thickens descriptions of the characters and situations she encounters, quibbles with her conscience, and reflects on human nature. Sometimes she apologizes for her digressions—which provoked criticism by some early readers, not accustomed to such lengthy reflections by characters—and admits her account of an event often takes longer than the event itself. But she is trying both to capture all the thoughts that were racing through her mind at the time and to articulate in hindsight things her 15-year-old self only intuited. The combination of self-analysis and sociological observation is almost Proustian; since the 500-page novel occupies only two months, had Marivaux continued at that pace he might have written a novel as long as Proust’s. The radical change in narrative time strikes anyone who reads French novels in historical sequence, as I’ve been doing, and the depth of Marianne’s psychological analysis (of herself and others) leads me to agree with critic Oscar Haac’s contention that it’s Marivaux, rather than Lafayette, who truly “created the modern psychological novel” (69). With Marianne European fiction finally achieves the psychological maturity of the best medieval Japanese fiction.
As in Pharsamond, Marivaux toys with the fictional status of his
project. Before Marianne pens her first letter, an unnamed narrator explains that he found her bundle of letters in the cupboard of a house he had just purchased; he guesses it was written 40 years earlier (i.e., around 1690). After sharing it with his friends, who urge him to publish it, he does so after changing a few names to protect their reputations. No sooner does Marianne begin writing than she admits, “I must confess this looks like the beginning of a romance; but it is not, I’ll assure you” (8), maintaining the first narrator’s pretense this is a nonfiction memoir. As a girl Marianne avidly read romances “à la dérobée” (in secret), and the 50-year-old narrator employs novelistic devices throughout the letters despite her protests that she is merely recording her memoirs. In one sense, the 15-year-old redhead created the first draft of this novel when she told her story to the English Miss Varthon, her uncorseted rival for Valville’s flighty affections: “My story became interesting; I expressed myself in a language sublime and pathetic; I spoke like the victim of fortune, or the heroine of a romance, who, though she may say nothing but what is true, adorns that truth with everything that can render it moving” (267). Marivaux complicates things further in his preface to the second installment of the novel (which appeared two and a half years after the first), where he challenges readers who complained that Marianne’s moral reflections in the first installment were out of place in a romance:
My answer is, If you look upon Marianne’s life as a romance, you are certainly in the right. In that case your criticism is just. There are then too many reflections in it, and it has not the form usually given to romances, or tales written only to amuse the reader. But Marianne did not in the least intend to write a romance. Her friend asks her for the history of her life, and she pens it in her own manner. Marianne has no scheme for making a book. She is no author, but only a thinking woman who has passed through a great variety of stations; whose life, in short, is a series of events which have given her a thorough knowledge of the human heart and of men’s characters. When she relates her adventures, she fancies herself conversing with a friend, to whom she speaks or answers in a familiar manner. . . . Her style, if you please, is neither that of a romance nor that of a history. (1:52–53)